My feet were hurting me for a while, so I finally made an
appointment to see a podiatrist. His office was on Park Avenue, and on the day
of my appointment in the late afternoon, I saw Grand Central Station in the
distance and the needle of the Chrysler Building sharper than ever, and I had
the funny feeling of not being quite myself, but of playing the part of a lady
going to a podiatrist on Park Avenue.

The doctor diagnosed me with something he called
Manhattanitis. It has another name too, but that’s what he called it, and he
said it comes from too much walking in the city. He gave me some inserts to put
in my shoes that felt like putting an avocado pit under each of my feet. I said
so to the nurse, who promised me that the feeling was normal and that it would
go away, but I left not quite believing her.

While I was up in that neighborhood, I decided to look into
the Scandinavia House, which I do every so often, and it always makes me feel
good to go in and look at the Scandinavian people lunching in the café. Once
inside, I learned that in their gallery upstairs was an exhibit of paintings by
the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi, who I love very much. So I went up in
the elevator and spent a long time just standing in awe before the paintings, stunned
by the beauty and quiet grandeur of each one. Many of them I knew from a book
that I have full of his pictures, but I’d had no idea that some of them were so
large.

For a long time I sat on a bench in one of the gallery rooms
and stared into the fog around St. Peter’s Church in Copenhagen: fog so true
that I felt I could taste it. I looked at each of the quiet interiors, some
with patches of cold sunlight on their floors, and had the thought I always have
when looking at Hammershøi's paintings, which is that he somehow managed to paint the
silence of those rooms in a way I’ve never seen anywhere else. And from the
little card beside one of them I learned the beautiful Danish word for that
sunlight: solskin.

Afterwards I started homeward in my strange-feeling shoes,
full of the quiet majesty of the paintings, in the near-winter dusk on Park
Avenue, thinking of the book of Hammershøi paintings at home and how I
came to have it. It was years ago when I bought it at Skyline Books on 18th
Street, long before it closed, from a girl working there who showed it to me.

I went into that bookshop at least once a week for years to
browse and pet the shop cat and sometimes buy something, and into the 1990s I
had them do book searches for me sometimes. I still remember two that I bought
for my dad, books he wished for and was so glad to get: The Informer by Liam O’Flaherty, which he had seen as a movie in
1935, and The Small House Halfway Up in
the Next Block, about the radio show Vic
and Sade which was his favorite as a kid. When I took him to Skyline Books one
day to browse the shelves (which he loved), my dad made a lot of loud huffing
and puffing noises because he had Tourette’s Syndrome. But the guy behind the
counter didn’t say anything to my dad about the noises the way some store
clerks used to. It might have been because he was there with me, or because the
guy behind the counter himself had a bad stutter.

The Hammershøi book was an extravagance. The day on
which the girl showed it to me was to be her last day working at Skyline. She
seemed sad when she told me so. The reason for her leaving the job, which she
loved, was that she hadn’t been feeling well for some time—in her head, she
said—so she had decided she would have to go back into the mental hospital. She
was always such a serious and capable bookseller. It seemed to not make sense,
but I believed her. On that day she told me she wanted to show me something she
thought I would like especially, and she pulled from one of the shelves the big
book of paintings. She didn’t try to make me buy it—none of them were ever
pushy about that in there—she just wanted me to see it, and when I did I had to
buy it. And I’ve never been sorry for that. I don’t remember the girl’s name,
if I ever knew it, but I think of her every time I look at the book, and wonder
whatever became of her. I miss Skyline Books every time I walk through that
block of 18th Street where it used to be.

I crossed over to Fifth Avenue on my way home, and as I
passed the Marble Collegiate Church at 29th Street I looked up at
the rooster weathervane atop its steeple. I thought of St. Peter’s in
Copenhagen in Hammershøi’s painting, with a rooster just like it on its own steeple, and
felt comforted by the two roosters. There are moments during the daytime when
the light is just right on Fifth Avenue, when the steeple of the Marble
Collegiate Church and its rooster stand out beautifully against the Empire
State Building behind it. And whenever I see it, I always wonder how many other
people have noticed the rooster on that day. I’ll wonder about the person who
put it there to begin with, and who made it. I went across 29th Street as it grew dark, and I
realized as I neared home that podiatrist’s nurse had been right. The avocado
pits had disappeared and my feet felt a thousand times better already.